Chapter 7: The Second Wave
An hour later the cabin had gone quiet in a way that wasn't quiet at all. Ethan and Maya sat at the front window, shoulders touching, whispering in fragments I couldn't make out. Niko lay beside me against the far wall, eyes closed, breathing slow and deliberate, too deliberate, the way a man breathes when he's trying to fake sleep.
I was too wired to fake anything. My body ached with exhaustion and my brain wouldn't shut off. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the killer's face in the gap in the door, those flat eyes and that laugh. So I lay there watching the ceiling instead, counting the gaps between the boards, mapping which ones leaked night sky.
Niko's breathing changed when I shifted. A hitch, barely there.
I sat up, silent, and pulled my hair back off my face, twisting it into a tight bun at the back of my skull and securing it with the elastic from my wrist. My heart was already going. Not from fear. Or not only fear.
He felt me move. His eyes opened, just a slit, and found me in the dark.
"Can't sleep," I whispered.
"Same."
I put a finger to my lips and glanced at the window. Ethan and Maya were silhouetted against the gray glass, their voices a low weave of words. Tripwires. Perimeter. Nothing about us.
I crawled to Niko on my knees, slow, keeping my weight on my palms so the boards didn't creak. He watched me come, and I watched him watching me, and something hot unspooled low in my belly. We could die tonight. We could die tonight and I was done pretending I didn't want this, didn't want him, didn't want to spend whatever time we had with his skin under my hands.
I settled between his knees and worked at the drawstring of his sweatpants. His breath caught.
"Anissa," he breathed. "What are you..."
"Shut up," I whispered, and smiled. "Unless you want them to hear."
I pulled his pants down over his hips. He was already half hard, and the sight of it, the smell of him, sleep and sweat and want, went straight through me like current. I wrapped my hand around the base and he stiffened against my palm, and I felt the tremor go through his thighs.
I took him into my mouth.
I didn't start gentle. There was no time for gentle and I didn't want it. I went down as far as I could on the first stroke, my lips stretched around him, my throat fluttering when the head hit the back of it, and I heard his fist close in the dust and dirt of the floorboard. His hips jerked up and I let him, I wanted him to use me, and I pulled back off him slow with my tongue flat against the underside, dragging, sloppy, until I came off with a wet sound that seemed enormous in the dark.
"Oh fuck," he mouthed, no sound, just the shape of it.
I went down again. Spit everywhere now, I could feel it running down his shaft and pooling in my fist at the base, and I used it, working him with my hand in counter-rhythm to my mouth, twisting, squeezing, my lips sliding wet and open down the length of him over and over. Sloppy and fast and filthy. My jaw ached and I didn't care. I made it as wet and obscene as I could, on purpose, because every slick wet noise was one more thing drowning out the forest outside, one more proof we were still alive enough to do this.
I pulled off to breathe, kept working him with my fist, and looked up.
He was already looking at me. His head was tipped back against the wall, his throat bare, his chest rising fast, but his eyes were down on me, my lips swollen and shiny around his cock, and when our eyes met something in his face just broke open. I held his gaze and let my tongue roll against the head, slow, deliberate, while my hand pumped him, and I wanted him to know, I needed him to know he wasn't going anywhere, I had him right here, right where I wanted him, mine.
He reached down and cupped the back of my head, not pushing, just holding, his thumb stroking my bun, and his eyes never left mine.
I sank down on him again and moaned around him, low, letting the vibration carry through him, and his whole body arched. His other hand clapped over his own mouth.
At the window, Maya's voice stopped. A pause, long enough to mean something. Then it started again, quieter, and I understood. They heard. They were letting us.
Something about that undid me completely. I went at him like I was starving, drool and spit and him, my cheeks hollowing, my hand flying at the base, my eyes streaming from effort, and every time I came up for air I looked at him and he was looking back and that was all I needed. His thighs were shaking. His hand tightened in my hair.
"Anissa," he breathed, barely sound at all, "I'm going to..."
I didn't slow down. I took him deeper, wanting it, and he came with his jaw clenched shut, his hand crushing the floorboard, his hips bucking up into my mouth. I swallowed everything, kept my mouth on him through all of it, through the twitches and the whining catch of his breath, until he softened and I came up slow, wiping my mouth on the back of my wrist.
He stared at me like I'd fallen out of the sky.
"Come here," he rasped. "God, come here."
He hauled me up his body and kissed me, deep, tasting himself, his hands shoving at my jeans, dragging them down over my ass, and I kicked them off one ankle at a time. No patience left. I straddled him, took him in my hand, still slick with spit and come, and sank down onto him with a sound I had to bury against his neck.
We fucked like that against the wall, silent except for breathing and the tiny wet slap of our bodies, fast and hard, my knees grinding into the dusty boards. His mouth on my throat, my nails down his back, my orgasm building fast and angry out of the fear and the wanting both. When it hit me I bit down on his shoulder to keep from screaming, and he followed a minute later, his fingers digging bruises into my hips.
I collapsed against his chest, both of us slick and shaking, listening to the treeline breathing under the wind.
From the window, Maya coughed. Very deliberately.
Then something shifted overhead. A creak, wrong somehow, too heavy for the roof settling.
We both went rigid.
A crash. Boards above us split, and a gout of dust and splinters rained down through a new black gap in the ceiling. I scrambled off Niko, jeans still around one ankle, knife somewhere behind me on the floor.
Above the gap, pressed down into it, was a face. Grinning. Different from the one at the door. Broad, slack-mouthed, delighted, eyes sweeping the room below like he was taking inventory.
And in one gloved hand, tilting so we couldn't miss it, a red gasoline can.
"Nice and cozy in there," the face said, and the grin widened. "One little spark, that's all it takes."
The gas can glinted, sloshing. My heart stopped. Niko was moving before I could think, yanking his pants up, boots skidding on the dust.
"What are you—" I started.
He didn't answer. He just launched himself at the wall, hands catching the edge of the roof gap, and hauled himself up and out into the night with a snarl that didn't sound like him at all.
A crash. A shout, cut short. Then both of them hit the dirt outside the cabin with a heavy, crunching thud that shook the floorboards.
"Fuck," Maya breathed. She was at the gap, skillet in hand. I grabbed the knife off the floor and shoved myself after her, shoving the door open, cold air rushing over my bare legs.
Niko was on top of the killer.
The broad-faced man was pinned under him, gasping, trying to throw him off. Niko didn't give him the chance. His fist came down, left, right, left again, each punch landing with a wet, meaty sound that I felt in my teeth. The killer's head snapped from side to side, dark blood spraying across the dirt.
"You think—" Niko grunted, punch— "you can—" punch— "fucking—" punch— "burn us alive?"
The killer's arms went limp. His head lolled. Niko kept hitting, knuckles split and shining, until the man under him stopped moving entirely.
Then Niko stopped too. He sat there on the killer's chest, breathing hard, fists still clenched, blood dripping off his hands onto the man's face.
I was shaking. My thighs were slick, the heat from just before still burning in my belly, and watching Niko pound that man into the ground like he was nothing, like he was less than nothing, had something coiling hot and low in me all over again.
Maya's hand found mine. She was trembling too, and when I glanced at her her lips were parted, her eyes fixed on Niko, and I saw it. The same heat. The same twisted, desperate hunger.
"Oh my god," she whispered.
Niko pushed himself up and stood. The killer's chest rose once, shallow. Not dead. Out cold.
Ethan walked past us, calm as anything, and looked down at the man on the ground. Then he looked at Niko, whose knuckles were raw and bleeding, who had just thrown himself through a roof gap to fight a man with a gas can with his bare hands.
Ethan held up his fist.
Niko bumped it, clumsy, blood smearing across Ethan's knuckles.
"Bro," Ethan said, grinning slow and wide. "That's what I'm talking about."